TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

When a Foreign Ministry spokesman was asked to explain why Chen Guangcheng had been imprisoned in his own home, this was his reply:

“After Chen Guangcheng was released from prison, he is a free person as far as I know. He has been living in his own house,” Mr. Liu stated. Challenged on that, he responded: “That’s what you said. As far as I know, he’s living in his hometown.” He also deflected a spate of other questions about Mr. Chen and Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, mostly saying that China’s legal system ensures proper treatment of all citizens.

“That’s what you said.” Asked about a fact that every one is aware of, a fact whose validity is unchallenged, the Chinese government’s official position is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Rather than deal with the reality and therefore that the government imprisoned a man for concocted crimes and, when set free, imprisoned him again in his own home, the Chinese government pretends that isn’t the case.

That’s what an authoritarian government that tries to mold what people perceive as reality into something convenient for them looks like. That’s this government’s strategy for maintaining power—deny inconvenient truths, prevent people from learning of them (the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng), and focus people’s attention on what you want them to look at: economic growth and, when convenient, “meddling” from foreign aggressors.

And that’s why the Chinese government is so afraid of Chen. Here is a blind, self-taught lawyer who escaped cordons and fences around his home, went to the nation’s capital, and evaded police. He revealed the Chinese state—the all-powerful Chinese state—to be incapable of finding a blind man with an injured foot in Beijing. In one night, he undermined the government’s work to deny what they do to people who are inconvenient to them, and what has been done to people as a result of the nation’s one-child policy. In other words, he not only embarrassed the government, he threw their abuses back in their faces, and in the world’s face.